There’s a collective action problem where the tools that best solve our individual problems are different from the tools we need to solve larger problems.

As a society, we generally prioritize large-scale tools, and the people who rely on small tools don’t like being sidelined.

To give an example, evidence and reason are very important for coping with climate change, economic recessions, etc.

But prioritizing rationality leaves out the people who live by tradition and intuition. I think this is the root of our polarization.

The moment you decide that our most pressing problems need reason, the people who can’t articulate or supply evidence for their intuitions are marginalized.

So you make the less educated crowd invested in doubtIng evidence and reason as a whole.

The less educated focus on cases where supposedly objective truth falls short in order to make their case for intuition and tradition.

Suddenly you’re in a post-truth world where fact-checkers aren’t even trusted and being on the side of intuition matters more than making sense.

Now repeat this exercise with personal responsibility mattering more at the individual level, and social circumstances mattering more at the societal level.

When we emphasize much-needed social change, we de-legitimize some people’s cherished belief in free will.

Same for self-determination locally and social justice more generally.

People who are good to their in-group are being crowded out by a team of academics and bureaucrats that want to coerce them in the name of justice. But it takes a lot of thinking to reach this conclusion.

So almost by necessity, the intuitive and tradition crowd does not understand the high-level reasons for these social justice policies.

So they feel these intrusions are invalid, and in doing so, they further entrench the social injustice that others want to correct.

This is why politics is so polarized.

One side has a traditional-intuitive moral code, and the other has a secular-rational moral code.

We can either obediently support the moral code we live in, or we can try to find mutual benefits between worlds.